Indian Creek - The Upside Down of Rock Climbing

How would you describe the holds that you use to propel yourself upwards? We need to fill up this void. Actually, instead of me holding onto the rock, I'm trying to just make my hand into a shape the rock holds onto me. For the most part. I mean, it was really good. The holds are solid. In this case, it's really like the backs of my knuckles right here create a lot of the pressure on that side, and so it's this kind of triangle shape, and it's really just like I'm cupping my hand. And that's a cupped hand. I'll drop this finger, my ring finger, on top of the rest of them, and I'll pull down. If it feels like your fingers are in a vice, you're doing it correct. And especially finger locks, sometimes they're just so good that it's almost scary. Like my feet slip, my finger is going to stay put, and my fat ass is going to rip my finger off. But if I take one pencil and put it over to the side and put the other one on the other side and give it a little pressure and mush them together, they like jam in there. So that's what we're doing with our fingers. Welcome to Indian Creek, the center of the crack climbing universe. To many, the creek represents a rite of passage, an endless assortment of sizes, shapes, and angles of featureless crack miles from so much as a gas station. There's something special about Indian Creek. It's its own little microcosm of the climbing world. It's a place where there are rock climbs that aren't like rock climbs anywhere else. Not that climbs like these splitter cracks don't exist in other places, it's just there's no place that is solely a climbing area for parallel-sided cracks. It's really its own world, and because of the physical nature of the climbing, there's this social scene that grows out of the crag that doesn't happen in a lot of other climbing areas, where you can climb as a group of like four people and feel like you've got plenty of climbing in because it's so physical and so much effort on each burn that you kind of want to wait on your three friends to climb, and it's different that way. I don't go climbing anywhere else where I feel that way. Mastering the nuance of crack climbing is a lifelong process, but there's a richness in the process of doing something you might have once found impossible. How would you describe holds in a splitter crack? It's the upside down of holds in rock climbing. So instead of holding on to something, you put your body parts in between two sides of a crack, and it holds on to you. So it's the upside down. I gained some weight. Oh, look at that. We have a little bit of rock cleaning. Did somebody say that we were doing obscure routes? That's exactly what we're doing. Wingate Sandstone is not unique. There's lots of it, and there's tons of cracks all over the place to climb. This place is just cool.